


Of spiders and thunders

by mireh_lilav



Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Peter is a Sunshine, Peter's and Thor's friendship, Social Media, Thor likes human technology, Thor likes to troll people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:14:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22823146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mireh_lilav/pseuds/mireh_lilav
Summary: After all, he could see himself in that bright-eyed, rumbling and over-eager kid.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Thor
Comments: 2
Kudos: 57





	1. Chapter 1

In retrospect Thor could have seen it coming. After Chitauri invasion and the debacle with the Black Order he shouldn’t be really this surprised to find himself at a random New York street fighting off wave after wave of aliens. At this point another alien invasion was as good as given almost. For being on a planet that has had a rather short and limited history of contacts with aliens, New York city seemed to proudly try to turn these pitiful statistics around. Three alien invasions in less than a decade. Thor would have called it a true success if he hadn’t been trying to stop one of said invasions for the last two hours or so. So much for a lazy Sunday afternoon. He might be getting older and lazier, sue him, but he would have rather stayed at the compound and relax.

He sighed exasperatedly. He really just wanted a stay-in Sunday. Was that too much to ask for? Apparently yes. He swinged Mjöllnir around to swat the swarming aliens away, ducking away from a strangely shaped axe that sailed next to his head. The invaders weren’t only peskily persistent. They were audacious. He threw the Stormbreaker at the axe owner and just for a good measure he let the electricity flow into the ground and brunch out into a high arch electrocuting anything and everything in the radius of a few yards around him. He was finally greeted with silence and stillness. His little street was empty save for him standing in the middle of it. The main battle must have moved towards the Stark Tower as it somehow always did.

The usual sounds of the battle muffled and somewhat distant, yet still echoing through the air were accompanied by the dull thud of countless explosions. Probably the wizards’ doing. Strange and the other wizards of the New York sanctum joined them this time, which was more than welcomed really. The more the merrier, so Thor always thought and wasn’t the one to say no to some additional assistance. With Steve out of commission and Sam nursing his broken femur there weren’t many avengers left. Especially since Natasha and Tony never made it out alive out of the final battle…

Thor shook his head. That took a dark turn extremely fast for sure. These memories brought up some very nagging thoughts. He needed to keep his head in the game. The sooner the invasion is over, the better for the city and its people. And hey, he might be able to get a quarter of his lazy-Sunday-stay-in after all!

Thor grabbed Stormbreaker and slung the weapon over his shoulder, trudging heavily towards the cacophony of the fight. And he could have been basking in the sun, while sipping some random cold beverage stolen from the fridge on the kitchen floor! What a tragedy! The short sprint wasn’t as refreshing as so many human enthusiasts of running had already tried to sell him it to be. He might have actually gotten better at human technology but the human culture of running and participating in, let’s say, marathons remained as obscure to him as the nature of a discord server. He didn’t want to explore either of these, thank you very much. At least he wasn’t doing this whole invasion alone. The Guardians must have tagged along as he just saw Quill fly face-first into the skyscraper windows for the second time in the last ten minutes. Truly delightful. He only hoped the rest was closely behind: Starlord had a penchant for troubles much bigger than an office building window after all.

He nearly reached the perimeter of the scuffle. He could already see Strange and Wong casting some complicated shielding spells and War Machine zooming by. A typical Sunday picture for him. He sighed deeply, weighed Stormbreaker in his hand, readying himself to send it flying into the nearest alien swarm, only to be sent onto the ground himself by a red and blue flurry of lanky limbs and teenage awkwardness. A very familiar flurry at that. One that stuttered his apologies.

„I’m so sorry, Mr. Thor, sir!” their youngest and more or less on and off Avenger piped nervously while splayed atop of him „Haven’t seen that big alien stuff coming!”

„No harm done!” Thor hauled them both to their feet with a gentle smile, patted the teenager on the arm and send him forth. „Be careful!” Thor yelled after the swinging teenager as an afterthought. Spiderman was a good kid after all.

Just like the random bursts of criminal or extraterrestrial, as in the current case, activity, Spiderman has become a staple of their Sunday Avenger duties. Sometimes skittish, sometimes a little bit nervous but always quite helpful actually. Of course Fury was grumbly whenever he was around and had to do a debriefing with a teenaged Avenger in tow and Stephen seemed to grow only more exasperated with every cultural reference or corny joke the teen made.

But Thor liked it. He might not have been the youngest in the great scheme of things but he remembered quite well what kind of person he was at Peter’s age. He could feel the same mixture of awkwardness, ceaseless energy and giddy excitement radiating from the kid that he too once felt heading into his very first battles.

He could see himself in that bright-eyed, rumbling and over-eager kid. And it made him smile.


	2. Chapter 2

Contrary to the popular belief, which has been shared by many of his teammates to his utter and complete disappointment, Thor wasn’t completely illiterate when it came to the earthen technology. Of course it has been quite difficult at the beginning to understand all the nuances of the Internet but according to his observations the older human generations have had the same problem! And why should he be called out when everyone over 40 seemed to have the same cognitive problems? Completely unfair!

Thor might not be the biggest fan of email. After all it was kind of a scam actually. It should be an electronic mail, not I-need-a-computer-to-receive-it-and-the-Internet-connection-too mail. It was a false advertising and he was to blame? Absolutely preposterous. It doesn’t mean however that he can’t send it now. He is very much able to. And he does so. Quite often. Just not to Stephen - he likes to annoy him just a little bit. Out of spite and gleeful mischief. But just a little bit.

That mischievous streak that he has alway somehow had and that made its appearance quite regularly was usually attributed to all the time he had spent in Loki’s company. After all his brother was the God of it. He breathed, lived and exuded mischief in doses, which might have been truly deadly to a simple-man onlooker. Thor’s own mischief usually got overshadowed but it was truly his own as any middle child’s. He was and still is a middle child after all. Even if he hadn’t known about it for the longest time. Even if he is the only one left standing out of his family. Even if… Thor still tries not to think about his family too much. He acknowledges but cannot accept it just yet.

Thor might not be the biggest fan and supporter of emails but he really likes Twitter. It has something poetic to it as it truly is just shouting short messages into the endless void of land of Twitter. Thor’s liking to it might be biased as he knows a thing or two about such bouts of shouting. He might have shouted into the void of a mountain ravine once or twice being in the ripe age of fifteen. What a good and wholesome teenage fun it was - the majority of local Asgardian bears would disagree but Thor just couldn’t help himself at that time. You can take Asgardian out of Asgard but not the other way round it seems. To Thor’s surprise his highly specific tweets about his intensely Asgardian experiences find resonance in human audience following his account and soon some of them get retweeted with „mood” or „lmao me”, which he managed to decode as the expressions underlining the kinship of ontological experiences. Apparently his skilful observations were so poignant that he was rewarded with the highly revered tile of „my fav shitpost account ever” by some. Thor is really proud of himself there. A true success.

Thor’s next venture into the world of human technology is called TikTok and it’s truly something of an eschatological epiphany. And there is a specific reason which prompted this particular endeavour into existence. You see, Thor is a curious creature with an inquisitive mind and a lot of wonder in his heart. He’s also bored every other Thursday. So it was only a question of time for him to investigate Peter’s slang. You can hear „road work ahead” only this many times before you start suspecting a pattern. Especially when Peter has always made a pregnant pause as if waiting for a specific answer. And so Thor went online to conduct his little investigation. And so he found all the vines compilations. He _might_ have watched a few dozen of them. He _might_ have written a few things down. He _might_ have practised a bit in the mirror. He _might_ have felt an immense sense of pride when Peter beamed him the widest, most surprised smile when he threw „I sure hope it does” at him.

It was Peter who showed him TikTok. But it was he himself who created an account and started uploading short silly videos. He gained some notoriety for doing short grocery store reviews of the products he liked the most (including but not limited to pickles, salted caramel ice cream and string cheese) and rants about the lack of sun-dried herrings at his local supermarket (a true barbarity). His proficiency as the master of disguise really came to light with this one as only a few mentioned a partial _semblance_ to _that_ Thor as his tiktoks made his way onto Instagram. Peter being his staunchest supporter took it up onto himself and commented on every single compilation and insta post reuploading Thor’s content of course.

The newest digital project of Thor was his Youtube channel. He had his run-in with Youtube during his extensive vine research and he liked the platform. He enjoyed the vine compilations but also the grocery hauls, furniture renovation and cooking videos (he might have nearly burned down the kitchen while attempting a wine reduction - good thing he had drunk the majority of said wine before, limiting the scope of the fire). And so Thor decided that Youtube was the platform to be on. He filmed at random. His first video might have been one dedicated to all the pigeons he has come across in New York. On the last Friday night, he posted a review of some obscurely flavoured Oreos that Peter found in the smallest corner store while on his school trip to Philadelphia.


	3. Chapter 3

In spite of what everyone thought, Thor’s world wasn’t only sunshine and rainbows (especially not the second one since his favourite rainbow was no more and will never again be). Sometimes it was as dark and desolate as Niflheim. Sometimes it was just as empty as the ice desserts of Jotunheim used to be. Thor’s unsaid motto always was: Keep your head up high and carry on. As a child and as a teenager he didn’t really have to face much problems and so his motto was one of these „easily said, easily done” things he liked to repeat and sell as his best advice to the less fortunate. It all had changed with the passage of time however. At some point it wasn’t just a bunch of empty simple words to say and ignore: it turned into a sort of mantra that actually helped him survive. So he repeated said words until he wholeheartedly believed in them - there wasn’t much else that he could do sometimes.

Even with his powers and strength he had to look on helplessly more times that he would actually like to admit to himself. It was especially difficult to heed his motto’s teaching of tranquility and resilience on these days which had been previously filled with joy and celebration. That’s why today has been absolutely terrible and so difficult to tolerate so far - they should have been celebrating his mother’s birthday. That’s why Thor hasn’t really left his room and has been just resting with a book in his lap - not really reading but needing an excuse in case someone tried to barge into his room and demand something of him. Besides, he really tried to read anddistract himself with that book but his thoughts have been stubbornly gravitating towards not so pleasant recollections.

He watched his world burn. Literally. He watched his brother die. Twice. He cradled his mother’s dead body. Because he was too slow and too dumb to save her. He witnessed his father turn to dust. He gained and lost a sister in the span of a few days - granted, she was a murderous maniac but a sister nonetheless. He wasn’t mourning her person, more so he was mourning something that would never be and that he had lost long before he actually knew he had it. Sometimes when he tried really hard, he could still pretend everything was well. That he was on Earth because he wanted to. Not because he didn’t have any other place to go as Asgard was destroy at his hand. He wasn’t of a nomadic nature. He needed a place to stay and to call his home. Thus, he sometimes played this little game with himself: he pretended to be looking out for the first signs of Bifrost in the high blue sky of New York state that was spun over his head. He had done it as a child while accompanying his father and mother on diplomatic visits in other realms and it still somewhat brought him a little bit of much needed peace when all would become too much to handle.

He rarely speaks of his family nowadays. He tries to avoid this particular topic at all costs. His happy-go-lucky-attitude must actually work as some kind of a repellent because his colleagues usually don’t really try to start this conversation with him and if they do, be it by accident or purpose, they actually try to steer themselves out of this minefield as soon as possible. He is almost thankful for it. Almost. Sometimes, against his better judgment and previous conversation experiences, he craves a word or two with someone. His skin almost crawls with the need to spit the words that he usually pushes deep into his heart and guards them with a steeled resolve.

However, in the week leading to today, his mood has worsened beyond manageable, he could only think of death and destruction and he has desperately tried to distract himself but to no avail really. At first, when such need to overshare struck, he just went to the gym and tried to tire himself completely out. It didn’t help for long. He tried binge-watching The Office next time - he hoped such unconventional strategy of handling grief might actually help. It really didn’t as somehow he saw himself and Loki in Jim’s and Dwight’s snarky relationship. He started crying at the gift-wrapped desk and didn't stop for the rest of the evening. He tried baking a bread yesterday because at this point he has nothing to loose. He ended up with a month supply of bread and an aching heart.

On the much dreaded day he’s been fearing for the past week, he opts out for staying in and trying to read a book. It might haven been James who recommended it to him. From what he can tell, it’s a great book - pity he can’t appreciate it appropriately. Book held open, he’s munching on the fourth slice of his homemade bread and contemplates trying to sleep the rest of the day off, when he hears the commotion outside his windows. Sure enough there is Peter: plastered to the glass and trying to get his attention. Thor opens the balcony door to let the teenager in. 

The thing with Peter is that he rambles a lot. He doesn’t ever stop talking until someone tells him off or scolds him. He’s one of these rare people that won’t silence themselves embarrassed, feeling zero interest from their conversation partners. Right now he is doing just that - telling Thor all about his day at school and a patrolling round in the city. He doesn’t omit even the smallest, least significant detail. His talk is trivial, his observations somewhat transcendental and Thor’s heart sinks with relief as he munches on that damned slice of sunflower seed bread. He allows himself to listen and the darkness that burdened his heart starts to dissolve bit by bit. 

He passes the bread to Peter and allows himself to smile.


End file.
